Food

I love this from the bottom of my black heart. It does figure that a black metal vegan chef would have to make seitan at some point, and he’d have to make the obvious pun. Just so you know though, it’s pronounced “say-TAN”, emphasis on the second syllable. Won’t affect your delivery in a metal voice though!

MAMelby linked that video to me in response to a thread on Facebook where I asked for some of your favorite seitan recipes. Here’s some of the ones that were sent my way:

And Josh, Token Spokesgay has an all-purpose basic seitan recipe, which apparently can be made in 20 mins in a pressure cooker. One of these days I’ll get a pressure cooker, and it’ll be all Josh’s fault. This is almost certainly what I’ll use as a base for my own experiments.

There’s this recipe, which is apparently vouched for by both Corrine Zimmerman and Steve Fritz, for barbecue “ribs”.

The recipes appear to be versatile enough to make sausage too. I’m looking forward to experimenting with this.

The common factors all seem to be beans and nutritional yeast. Some have vital wheat gluten, so if you have friends with Celiac’s or gluten intolerance, be careful. There are some variants to take care of different textures, too. Otherwise, everything else appears to be “season to taste”. And that, I can definitely do. For what it’s worth, my taste would likely entail garlic, smoke, onions, and soy sauce and/or worcestershire sauce. I would start there and add spices for different intended effects.

There’s this dish passed around among Acadian families called Coquilles St Jacques, a French dish involving scallops and white wine sauce covered with Gruyere and baked in clamshell dishes. This isn’t how I was shown how to make the dish at all, though, and it seems every family does it a little (or a lot) differently. This is no Alton Brown recipe; it’s not an exact science, more of an art. Through a large number of modifications, I’ve come to a rough outline of a recipe, though my way of making this recipe is incredibly flexible and forgiving, so you could easily modify it to your tastes. I’m calling it Coquilles Maudit Jason, with “maudit” meaning “damned”, seeing as how I’m not in any way a saint.

I’ve included a number of options, including a choice between white wine sauce and savory gravy. If you try this, let me know how you’ve modified it in the comments below.Continue reading “Coquilles Maudit Jason”→

Even at Thanksgiving, even as a child, I was always “that kid”, who couldn’t leave well enough alone when someone said something blatantly false, or worth questioning and examining further. My father kept admonishing me to be on my best behavior for company, which invariably meant not challenging unevidenced or ridiculous beliefs.

This was one of the ones that filtered into my subconscious and I even caught myself thinking this very thing a few years ago, til I was corrected on it. All because I was asked to turn off my skepticism as a child.

I guess I’m posting this to tell you not to squelch people’s skepticism of strange unevidenced beliefs even if those beliefs are seemingly harmless.

Unless you know there’s absolutely no goodwill to burn, let the walking Snopes database do their thing, because as annoyed as the person may be who is corrected, they’ve actually had a valuable service done to them even at the cost of a little holiday peace. A service that helps insulate people from making mistakes, and having factoids filter into their brains as though they were facts, which might introduce errors in their reasoning later in life.

And if there’s absolutely no goodwill to burn at the Thanksgiving table, and you must suffer the tyranny of someone spewing factoids, both harmless and harmful? Well, consider a smaller and more intimate Thanksgiving meal next year.

But yeah. Sorry for the tangent. Turkey doesn’t cause food comas. And I wish I could spend the American holiday with my American friends and family, so enjoy your time with them. And I hope you find a balance between the factoid-spewers and the fact-checkers so you can all enjoy your meal.

OTTAWA, September 21, 2012 – The public warning issued on September 20, 2012 has been expanded to include additional ground beef products because the products may be contaminated with E. coli O157:H7. Previously identified products included in this recall can be found on the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) website at www.inspection.gc.ca/recalls.

The CFIA is warning the public, distributors and food service establishments not to consume, sell, or serve the ground beef products described below because the products may be contaminated with E. coli O157:H7.

This recall also includes unlabelled and/or unbranded ground beef products available for sale from August 24 through September 16, 2012 and sold at retail stores not identified in the CFIA’s product list below, which may include small retailers, local meat markets and butcher shops, etc. Therefore, the CFIA is advising consumers who are unsure if they have the affected ground beef product in their home to check with the store(s) where the product was purchased or throw it out.

“What? But that’s not controversial at all! Tons of products have obliquely mentioned evolution in a mild and tangential sort of way!” you say. And you might be right, if the intended market wasn’t heavily populated by antiscience creationists on a hair trigger.Continue reading “Dr Pepper vs the creationists”→

Not only am I only celebrating the secular part of the holiday, I’m doing it in such a manner that onlookers might think I was the single most evil person in the universe for doing it. See, for lunch, I’m eating deviled live baby chickens, whole.

The beak’s a little crunchy, putting it at odds from the rest of the chick’s squishiness, but what can you expect?

This is pretty much what I would answer, if I could do it succinctly, every damned time someone asks Jodi and I why we aren’t having kids.

I think I’m going to go learn how to create flaming swords out of household parts. Also, could you guys kindly give me all your bottle caps? They might… I dunno… come in handy after the collapse. Even if said collapse doesn’t happen as a result of a nuclear apocalypse, I just want to be sure I get ahead of the dystopian future.

No, Pat. It’s usually yellow-orange. Depending on what kind of cheese you use, it might even come out completely white.

I apparently missed this with all the hustle and bustle around this past Thanksgiving. I would have demanded we include a course of mac and cheese had I seen this in time. Well, there’s always Thanksgiving ’12.